23 January 2011

My short story ‘Operation Stack’ is going to appear in a forthcoming issue of the Irish sf magazine Albedo One. It’s set around the Channel ports of Kent in an alternate 1985 – inspired by histories of the UK secret state, eighties and neo-eighties TV drama, and an idea that first came to me when I thought I heard a radio traffic report say that the time tunnel, rather than the Tyne tunnel, had had to close…

30 November 2010

I’ve just heard that my flash fiction crime story ‘The Meaning of Hard Work’ is going to be published at Every Day Fiction. (One of the readers calls it ‘light years beyond politics’ and another enjoys its ‘nice level of dark suspense’.) I’ll update with a publication date once I have one…

22 September 2010

What’s the next likely movement in speculative fiction? According to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., one of nine writers asked by SF Signal, it’s neo-oriental cyber-imperialism:

Take a near future post-colonial setting — best in Asia, but even the Balkans will do –, place it in a future dominated by natural environmental catastrophe and the global manipulations of Euro-American corporations allied with native elites, include AIs with retro-national qualities (this makes them seem “neo-indigenous”), simulations of archaic beliefs, neo-Ruritarian political intrigues — add a dash of feralized GM animals (cyber-beasts will do) — and a plotline with no possible realistic political resolution, since neither nature nor technology has any redeeming value any more. Good stuff and diversity — from Air to River of Gods to Wind-Up Girl, maybe even City and the City fits here (ironically).

It takes years. I read a lot. I travel a lot — and as much as I can afford. I talk to people, I read the papers. I cook the food. I buy the music, I follow the sports teams. I try to second-guess what the government will do in international politics. I learn a bit of the language. I study the religion. I study the etiquette. I try and work out what the day-to-day details are like. I watch people. I have a very strong visual memory and I can recreate an entire scene in my head and observe details. I cultivate an eye for detail. I take thousands of photographs of boring everyday things. I look at what’s on sale in gas stations and what that tells you about a culture. I study the ads. I talk to more people. I get hammered on the local booze. I try to take the country’s political position in the world news. I watch television. I read books for those tiny details. Is this like Method Acting? WTF are you doing with those lights?!?

13 July 2010

Share with us two (2) ‘teaser’ sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.

You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your ‘teaser’ from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

Please avoid spoilers!

A quick one from The Red Tree by Caitlín R Kiernan – a diary-format horror novel about a writer having an even less productive summer than I am. (At least I’m not being haunted by a dead lover or an old oak tree.)

Anyway, I’m left to conclude that the late Dr. Harvey’s unfinished book, in all likelihood, went to the local landfill or a bonfire or whatever, if it’s true that the daughter in Maine claimed none of his effects. I can’t imagine why Blanchard would have lied about something like that. All that survives is that one peculiar page, incomplete reflections on ‘bloody apples’ from a tree that died seventy years ago. (p. 67)